Valerie Plame Wilson on Nuclear Weapons and 'Countdown to Zero'

A scene from COUNTDOWN TO ZERO, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

In 2003, Valerie Plame Wilson went from being an undercover CIA officer specializing in nuclear proliferation to a reluctant celebrity when members of the Bush administration outed her to the press. She has stayed mostly out of the public eye since, but now she’s lending her expertise and her voice to "Countdown to Zero," a new documentary about nuclear weapons by many of the same people who made "An Inconvenient Truth."

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The world has fundamentally and profoundly changed from where we were during the Cold War, and because of the proliferation of nuclear technology, ironically enough, it's the countries that have nuclear weapons that, in fact, are in the weaker position because of it.

Director Lucy Walker makes clear that American leaders have been warning us about the threat of nuclear weapons for decades. A quote from one of President Kennedy's speeches is used many times throughout the film...

“Every man woman and child, lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment: by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

Looking at both the past and present, the film is blunt about the probability of a nuclear bomb going off by accident, miscalculation or madness, and confronts how real the threat of a devastating nuclear attack still is today.

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Comments [1]

Ed
from Larchmont

What we can do to avoid nuclear terrorism is to reform our lives to avoid the serious crimes we are committing: the killing of 4,000 human beings in abortion each day is moral evil and terrorism that allows other forms of terrorism.